Santa Clara is the saint of semiconductors. Cough
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Free Software Foundation calls for ACTA fight
A SECRET TREATY that will see the governments of the world hand over control to the music and film industries is being challenged by open sourcerors.
In a statement, the Free Software Foundation (FSF) said that the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) treaty is designed to attack the rights of computer users in some 40-odd countries.
"ACTA threatens, in a disguised way, to punish Internet users with disconnection if they are accused of sharing, and requires countries to prohibit software that can break DRM," the FSF statement said.
It is throwing its influence behind a declaration against the treaty and it is asking people to sign it.
This followed the Wellington Declaration which the FSF said does not go far enough because it suggests that limited prohibition, along the lines of Article 11 of the WIPO Internet Treaty, might be acceptable.
"This limited prohibition would give government backing to certain kinds of digital handcuffs. To accept this much, without even a fight, almost begs the ACTA negotiators to try for more," the FSF said.
"The past 20 years have seen global waves of harmful changes in copyright law - some promoted by WIPO. To confront a further assault by presenting the status quo as ideal means we stop fighting to reverse them. It means that our adversaries need only propose a further affront to our rights to gain our acceptance of their last affront," the FSF said.
"We should demand positive changes to recover freedoms already lost. For instance, many countries already have laws restricting devices that can break digital handcuffs; these must be repealed. WIPO treaties demand such laws; countries that have signed these treaties must withdraw from them. To stop ACTA from requiring such laws is just one battle in the fight to eliminate them," the statement continued.
Introducing the FSF declaration, Richard Stallman wrote, "We will have to stop them. To build a movement to stop them, we need to say, 'Join us and fight!' Therefore I have written a firm and clear declaration of opposition to the aspects of ACTA that threaten our freedom."
Stallman's call to fight ACTA is here, and the FSF declaration itself is available to read and sign here. µ
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The whole problem is that all these laws force a market that does not exist to continue, with brute force, so you cannot say capitalism and the market will fix itself since they won't allow it.
And they get away with it because the power is with the money first and the people ... well lets be optimistic and say 7th-ish?
Capitalism is as sound a system as communism.
It is a fact that the marketplace -- and thus the people -- do hold the power over the capitalistic world. As other commenters have noted, we can forsake this power and allow ourselves to be "lazily" goaded into funding our own oppression by our corporate abusers, or we can just say no, and not support the MPAA and RIAA-affiliated media industry and companies like Apple and Microsoft which are in bed with them and have their own "crowd-control" policies in play.
Shrugging your shoulders and giving up more and more of your freedoms and rights while queueing up to see all the latest films, buy the latest videos, or purchase the latest shiny iPhone is not going to help here.
Supporting only companies which in turn support your rights as citizens is the answer. An exclusive open-media, open-source software diet is the recipe for ridding yourself of bloated oppressors, and this is a very achievable goal.
These cats need to SPAM twitter, facebook, and myspace, etc. with FSF propaganda... get geeks worldwide to flood inboxes with petitions... it worked for Obama, right?
If they just SPAM slanderings to everyone that the MAFIA are communists, homosexuals, and they all took performance enhancing drugs and lied about it, then that's enough to crush their U.S. cred. Those seem to end careers pretty quick in the states. Oh yeah, and if they can somehow blame the oil spill on the MAFIA, that'd help too..
@nECrO, unfortunately "voting with your wallet" is a strategy that is doomed to failure.
Firstly, as you also pointed out, people are either too lazy to take action themselves (and leave it all to others) or too stupid to see the threat. So these people (the majority) will keep feeding the beast and buying products from companies who continue to treat them with utter contempt.
Secondly, even if people did stop purchasing products from the media mafia, the companies concerened would just blame their falling sales on "piracy" and then use the figures as "evidence" that they need to bring in even more draconian controls in order to guarantee their revenue stream (and the accompanying lifestyle to which they have become accustomed).
"We. the common people, hold the real power. We buy the products and services." - Except capitalism is undemocratic since $1 = 1 vote in the market place, and since the top 1% own 95% of all there is to own I'd say voting with our wallets doesn't count for much more than dictating supermarket product lines.
Not that I disagree with you W.-, I just think that there are different ways of exerting pressure and swaying motivation.
In short, vote with your wallet and your vote on election day can be a mighty big stick to wield.
We. the common people, hold the real power. We buy the products and services. We cast the votes.
Unfortunately, a vast majority of us are also a lazy lot, either content to let others fight our battles or too stupid to see the threat until it's too late.
Every Inq reader should read and sign this document, regardless of the differences of our opinions. Unless of course you support such legislation. In which case you should just do the world a favor and die.
The only real effective way to fight ACTA is bribing the politicians with more than they get from the media-mafia, but only the oilcompanies have such resources and I don't see them stepping up to the plate, they got their own worries.